1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of cloud computing and specifically to working offline with a virtual data center in a cloud computing environment.
2. Description of the Field of Art
Cloud computing provides virtualized resources as a service over a network, for example, the internet. The cloud computing infrastructure comprises services delivered through data centers built on servers. Cloud computing allows efficient utilization of resources, for example, storage, memory, processing, and bandwidth across clients. Server virtualization techniques are typically used to provide virtual machines (VMs) to users to work with.
Also, typically computing power of the client device is significantly less than the computing power of the servers in the data center. Hence the same task may take much less time when executed on the server of the data center compared to the client device. A user of a client device prefers to execute resource intensive tasks on the server of the data center if possible.
Communication over the internet between a client device and a server in a data center typically allows faster download speed but slower upload speed. For example, a client device downloading a large file from the server over the internet may be able to download the files in significantly less time compared to the time taken to upload the same files from the client device to the server.
Examples of tasks that can take significant amount of time when performed in a cloud computing environment include tasks that require uploading of large amount of data to the server in a data center. For example, a user may need to install several applications in the environment that the user is working with in the cloud computing environment. The applications may be available to the user on media, for example, discs for software installation that can be loaded into the user's computer. Installing the applications on the virtual machine conventionally requires the user to upload large files from the user's computer to the server. Furthermore, the installation process may be difficult to execute in the server of the data center if the installation needs to disable the network of the machine.
The figures depict various embodiments for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles described herein.